1. Is there an easy way to retrieve a text which has been typed in WORD and which has vanished without me having deleted it?

2. When I have deleted a text, I know how to retrieve it, by hitting Ctrl + Z but this doesn't work when the text vanishes without having been deleted.

I am on Windows 10



Thank you in advance for your usual help.

Joe B.

Sorry but I have no idea what might be causing this problem.

On OSX the default is for text documents to auto-save (even untitled docs) but not sure that applies to MS Word in any case.

MS Word for OSX is a primitive beast. The text encoding it uses is incredibly slow and not always compatible with other text programs. I doubt the text encoding process has changed for MS Word in the past 35 years making MS Word a dinosaur in more ways than one. Copying a very large quantity of text between MS Word and other text programs might take several minutes (even up to 15 mins in my experience - also memory and cpu intensive) whereas other text programs can do such a massive copy-paste in a matter of 5 to 15 seconds. Also sometimes the text encoding by MS Word is incorrect and unusable when copied into another text program.

I recall back in the 1980's there were two competing word processing programs (WordPerfect and WordStar) very similar to MS Word and both were arguably as good if not superior and my preferred choice on the Windows platform. But these programs appear to have vanished. (When it comes to superior distribution and marketing, it's not always the best product that wins and eventually the better one vanishes off the market. BETA versus VHS video players was a good example except that also included patent issues.)

10 Free MS Word Alternatives You Can Use Today

You hit the nail on the head there.

Now we have to contend with PC programs that are written for phones.

Joe........


I also use Word as well as MS Works Word. More or less same thing.
But the newest version I have is for windows 7.
In adding anything to a document I always have to press Save to not lose it, plus the document must first be named and saved to add it to.

Auto save is only active when it wants to be, I have lost 100's of hours of work with things just vanishing, especially on laptops.

I've noticed in settings for MS Word for MacOSX there is this option:

Output and Sharing > Save > Save AutoRecover info every: #x minutes

The default appears to be 10 minutes if this option is enabled. This figure can be reduced to one minute. Is there such an option for the Windows MS Word?

But as sleepybear91 pointed out, I don't know how reliable this is. Then the question is where is the document saved in auto-save mode and does it also apply to previously unsaved documents. I haven't tested this out.

I'd recommend saving and naming the document soon or immediately after you create it. In that way it should be auto-saving (in theory) if that option is enabled. If the document is purely being used as a scratch (to make quick notes within) work document to delete later then you can choose to delete the document after your work is finished within the document and the need for the document has passed. Or create a Word document saved with a name such as Scratch where the contents can be deleted or over-written after you have finished with it.